"Champions of Flowerbud: A Superhero Harvest Moon"
Author's Note: I have been wanting to start this story for a looooong time and here it is. This story will contain the chronicles and adventures of Mary, Karen, Popuri, Ann, and Elli from BTN as superheroes. They'll have villians, crime fighting, personal drama, and a little romance thrown in for good measure. While BTN is the primary source, keep your eyes peeled for familiar names and faces from other HM games and Rune Factory as well. I think you'll find this to be a fun and unique story and I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it. Enjoy
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Prologue
"In a time long lost, beyond the reach of any memory, great hands once broke the earth and shaped from it a man. From this man was crafted woman. And together, they brought forth to all the earth a great populous. It was from earth man came and to earth he always returns."
"I have always been. As timeless and ageless as the land itself. I am blessed of many things, but also am I cursed. And as the land suffers, so do I suffer. As the people suffer, so do I suffer. Always has it waxed and waned, yet now their hearts stagnate and waste with the weakest of qualities. They are petty, spiteful, shallow-even hateful. The people are the greatest part of the land with which they walk, yet they've sealed over it with rock and stone. Only their hearts are left, and those hearts are the cold, gray hearts of the cynical."
"Their eyes cast down, their hearts filled with naught, their lives under a constant vigil of scorn in everything they surround themselves with. It was not always this way. Long have they suffered and longer still have I suffered alongside them. It cannot remain so, for to lose Hope is to lose life. People need Hope."
"With greatness of power, I will give them Hope."
"From my heart of hearts, I will chose Five and with them, eyes shall lift up, hearts will swell in pride, and Hope shall return anew and flowe as a river across the land."
"Mary, you have been chosen."
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Volume One: The Flowerbud Five
"Chapter One: Mary."
Mary Mayweather considered herself many things, but a hero was not one of them. Diminutive, intelligent (exceedingly so), and prone to bouts of short-lived depression. She lived day-to-day free of the worries of much of the world outside of her small library. From early morning to late afternoon, her eyes rarely left a book's pages. She lived for the written word and devoured everything she could get her hands on. Since the tender age of three when she began reading her bedtime stories to herself, it was clear she was an exceptional young woman. Home-schooled all her life, yet she destroyed educational standards. Inquiries into her true potential had been met with offers via snail mail to institutions and organizations wishing to foster her intelligence in an environment they believed was more fitting to her.
She shunned them all. She was needless, to put it mildly. She had books, a home, and a family that loved her. She was the only one who wanted to run the Flowerbud Library and, indeed, the position of Librarian was something she was vastly over-qualified to fill. But from mid-morning to late afternoon, Mary was found in her environment: a quiet, dusty library in a corner of the earth that the rest of the world seemed to forget had existed. She had poured through every book in the place, and devoured the new ones that came in via mail order. However, Mary was not one to be satisfied with an occasional volume. With the speed at which she read, a new book would last her one day, at best.
So Mary had to break a few rules.
Flowerbud Island was as far from civilization as one could get in this modern world. At night, however, a glance across the bay would reveal the distant smudge of Metropolitan Heights, a bustling, busy city known for its towering skyscrapers and mass population. At night, the city lit up the skyline in brilliant shining lights. Flowerbud Island was privately owned property of most of the residents, which kept tourists and vacationers away from the pristine, untouched lifestyle that was present in the day-to-day activities of the average resident of Mineral Town. Even though the town was called Mineral Town, it was just tradition to refer to everywhere on the island as "Flowerbud". And in Mineral Town, there was a rule about bringing in things to the town that would alter its very existence. The people liked simple and they preferred to keep it that way. The most advanced piece of technology on the island was probably the General store owner's pocket calculator.
It was safe to say that anyone who stumbled onto Mary's laptop would not have known what it was or what to do with it, but Mary, being the insatiable mental sponge that she was, could not help herself when she secretly spent her earned income on a laptop and wireless satellite internet connection. She sat here, at her desk at the Library, everyday with one eye on her computer screen and the other eye on the window to her left, making sure that when someone decided to pay her a visit, she had ample time to close the laptop and slip it into a drawer before anyone saw it.
Better safe than sorry.
With only the sound of her finger double-tapping the touchpad, she studied. She read. She learned. Most of all, she thought. She thought about anything and everything. She thought about the outside world and all the wonders and horror that were around every corner. In the end, she always came to the same conclusion: she was glad to live here and not there, in Metro Heights.
The first glance at Mary would almost certainly have lasted only a second and then been promptly forgotten. Diminutive at a less-than-staggering five feet tall, she was shorter than most girls by a few inches. She cared enough about her looks enough to bother brushing her hair in the morning and leaving it at that. When puberty hit, or so she read, girls tended to blossom into the cusp of womanhood and would likely end up filling out their blouses with a curvaceous figure. Well, Mary never needed more than a simple glance downward to be reminded that she had barely managed to eek out a feminine figure while all her friends were hauling boulders around. Intelligent though she was, she wasn't immune to an occasional frown when no one was looking. Why else would she wear a simple green skirt, white blouse and green sweater vest? Who was there to impress?
As much as it irritated her, her general disgust with herself was often short-lived, as she often came to the conclusion "What's the point?" Concerning the issue of bachelors on Flowerbud Island, the problem and answer to the problem were both the same: There were none. Nothing but older folks and couples with teenage daughters. Unless Mineral Town became a sudden hot spot for Spring Break, things weren't changing. Things hadn't changed here in a long time. And Mary was fine with that. Besides, she was not at all enamored with the prospect of the island being full of hormone driven young men who drank and burped and farted and all the other unseemly things they were apparently capable of.
And yet, there was always the part of herself that dreamed. And when those moments came, she was content to put everything away and dive into a romance novel. They were poorly written, often overly dramatic, over-descriptive, and yet the provocative nature of them always stirred a part of Mary that couldn't help but insert herself into a moment from the front cover, wrapped in the muscular arms of the physical pinnacle state that a human male could achieve. She read and she dreamed and she wondered. But in the end, she snapped back to the here and now, back to the comforting knowledge that nothing had changed and neither had she. So her days went by. Just like tonight, as she sat at her laptop, reading a news story just after having closed the Library with the setting sun.
She did as she always had done: devoured all the information in the world while she nibbled on a small stalk of bamboo, her favorite snack. Yes, nothing in Flowerbud changed. Her, least of all.
"MARY, YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN!"
The words shot through Mary like a bolt of lightning. It rang through her ears so loudly they were left ringing. Her spine shivered and every nerve in her body came alive as though a thousand volts of electricity coursed through them. Her heart raced.
Her mind, normally a steel trap of reason and clarity, swam numb and unfocused save for one thing: The Goddess Pond. The image of it was burned into her eyes, her mouth moving silently with words she could not form. The Pond!
The Pond called to her, strange though it seemed. And yet, in the haze that surrounded her mind, it was not strange at all and its compulsion left her both at a sense of ease and now bound in determination. She had to get to the pond, she had to reach it as soon as possible. The thick muddle that was now her thought process would not allow anything to occupy her thoughts besides reaching the Pond. If her eyes had not strayed onto her laptop as she thrust herself out of her seat, she would not have remembered it.
The need to hide her laptop was so strong, it fought with her sudden compulsion to leave and head for the Goddess Pond. So it can be fought against She thought idly as she stuffed her computer clumsily into a drawer and slammed it shut. Fighting the compulsion only made it stronger and by the time she reached the door, her tiny feet were practically running down the paved path leading to the library and into the streets of her home sweet home.
Flowerbud streaked by her until she came to the long forgotten path that led out of town. She never hesitated as she left the paved stones of Flowerbud's walkways and towards the old abandoned farm.
She had been on the farm many times in the past, when the old farmer who had lived there was still alive. He had passed away some three years ago and his farm had fallen into disrepair. The cozy old home that had once always smelled of homecooked food now sat dark and brooding, watching her as she passed it. On her left, the fields sat overgrown and untended, no better than the wilds of forest that hung at the base of Mount Moondrop, the mountain at the center of Flowerbud Island.
Picking her way through the trail that lead through brush and trees, she began to leave the familiar sights of home behind. The last one-the Hot Springs-fell behind her in her trek and then she was on to the mountain path with the moon firmly settled into the night sky. Her parents would worry, but she could not shake the compulsion to find the Goddess Pond.
What was waiting her there? As she complied with the unnatural need to find this place, she felt free enough to contemplate, to think. Though it defied all logic and science, her sudden obsession could not have been natural in origin. She was methodical by nature, obsessive to detail, quick to bring all her accumulated experience to the forefront when she needed it the most. To lose her most powerful asset to a sudden, unexplainable yearning was not natural.
Whatever the reason, she would have her answer soon enough. The trees were thick her in the base of the mountain, with no trail to guide her. However, even had she forgotten the old ways to reach the Goddess Pond, she would not have had to worry, for her compulsion would have thrown her through the thicket and into the Grove.
Looking ahead, through tree and brush, she came to see a soft, green light glowing through the thick forest. The closer she came, the more her heart soared at the prospect of finding the Grove, where the Goddess Pond awaited. It was ahead, where the green light was glowing. No, that wasn't right. The Grove was the source of the light, she was sure. It felt like it had taken hours to find, but in truth the sun had barely set. Just beyond the last line of trees, the Grove glowed its heavenly green and beckoned her.
With her heart exploding in delight to finally arrive, Mary set foot into the Grove where the Goddess Pond lay, pristine, clear, untouched. With a small gasp, she realized the Pond glowed with an otherworldly power.
And she realized she was not alone.